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Kindred was once a popular pick in competitive play, but in the meta of carnivorous junglers, she has been quite absent. With not a lot of early burst damage that offers quick wave clear, lack of utility outside of her ultimate, and a scaling mechanic that necessitates lane abandonment or late game playmaking, it’s not hard to see why.

So Riot put her through some changes, giving her significant tweaks in an attempt to make her a more attractive pick. Her scaling passive now gives her more attack range based on the stacks; 75 after the first four stacks, and 25 for each stack after. On top of that, her stacks now augment her abilities, with her Q giving more attack speed per stack, her W doing more current health damage to its targets per stack, and her E gaining cast range as well as doing more missing health percentage damage per stack.

Her skills also went through changes of their own. Q skill now grants attack speed for four seconds and a faster dash speed. Her W can now be cast in an area, no longer needed to be centered on her, which means it can be cast over a wall to chase down fleeing enemies. It also does more damage based on the target’s missing health, and switches from physical or magic damage. Her E does more damage based on missing health and no longer maximum health damage, a faster missile travel speed, and allows her W to critically strike targets below 15 percent health for 50 percent bonus damage, scaling off of her critical hit chance.

The proposed changes seem like they will significantly increase the damage output for Kindred with attack speed steroids, a quicker moving slow, and an area-of-effect ability that can now be more reliably chase down enemies. But seeing as her stacks are still very important to her ability to deal more damage, it remains to be seen if the changes will change her outlook.

Many of the changesproposed and discussed through dev blogs and tested through PBEs have stuck in patch 7.11. Most notably are Malzahar’s major change to his voidlings, an earlier warning indicator for Zac’s Elastic Slingshot, Caitlyn’s nerfs to her base attack speed as well as not allowing the item Runaan’s Hurricane to more quickly stack her passive, Yasuo’s Q charge lasting a lot shorter before having to commit to a knock up, and some small nerfs to both Syndra and Ahri, who have been too dominant in the mid lane for the past couple of patches.